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Conductor has daunting task

“Haydn’s Seven Last Words” will be performed by Nashville Sinfonietta, conducted by Dean Whiteside (Right) and featuring poems by Rick Hilles on Saturday, August 31, at Blair School of Music. Submitted photos

Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music presents another innovative, one-night-only performance this coming Saturday. In “Haydn’s Seven Last Words,” the Nashville Sinfonietta, under the direction of Dean Whiteside, will perform “The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross” interspersed with new poems by Rick Hilles and read by Michael Hime, senior lecturer in music literature at Blair.

The concert will run for about 90 minutes and will be presented without intermission. Proceeds will benefit Shade Tree Clinic, an organization that is run by Vanderbilt University medical students and provides health care to uninsured and underinsured patients.

Michael Hime. Courtesy of Vanderbilt University

Nashville Sinfonietta was founded by Whiteside four years ago and features musicians from the Nashville Symphony as well as Blair faculty and students. Since graduating from Vanderbilt three years ago, Whiteside has been living in Vienna while earning a master’s degree in conducting. It was in Austria that he came across the “Seven Last Words” for the first time.

He was surprised by its beauty and that he hadn’t heard it before — especially since the music was considered a masterpiece during Haydn’s lifetime.

There are three forms of the music: an orchestra piece, a string quartet and an arrangement for orchestra and chorus.

“In terms of the music, it’s totally unique. I know no other piece of music which has seven slow movements one after the other,” Whiteside said. “All different flavors of slowness: adagio and lento and largo, all these different Italian designations which all basically mean slow, really slow, pretty slow, quite slow.”

Personal experience informs poetry

Originally commissioned for a Good Friday service in Cádiz, “The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross” premiered in 1787. It is still a frequent part of Lenten services in Austria, according to Whiteside, where spoken words are interspersed between the seven sections.

For the Nashville performance, Whiteside wanted to place the orchestral version within a “ceremonial context,” one that was more spiritual than religious. To that end, he decided to incorporate specially commissioned poems. Using poems or other readings with the piece is a common way of presenting it — readings of works by John Donne are often used, for example.

Rick Hilles, assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt, discovered that to be the case while researching the “Seven Last Words.” (As it just so happens, Hilles occasionally team-teaches a course on 17th-century poetry featuring Donne.)

Hilles got his “assignment,” as he refers to it, from Whiteside in May.

Rick Hilles. Courtesy of Vanderbilt University

“It was a very intense period of composing, sometimes listening to the music, trying to get that more inside me and mostly trying to find my way toward the resonance or the possibilities and the reverberations in these last statements of Christ,” Hilles said.

The resulting seven poems are slices of contemporary life based on Hilles’ own experiences (an encounter with a mountain lion), his reactions to stories in the news (a mother claiming her murdered son’s body) or a friend’s heart procedure.

“Some of the details I would never have imagined them that way,” Hilles said of the latter poem, based on the sixth utterance (“It is finished.”). “That’s one of those poems, all the important details are true and the other details that are imagined are just trying to re-imagine what it might have been like in that moment to be awake while somebody is rebuilding your heart. My hope is that in the context of the music it will be suitably respectful and moving.”

Many of the poems are contemplations of finality as people confront extraordinary situations, somehow finding a degree of strength and grace along the way. Each poem incorporates one of the utterances in a context far removed from its origin yet surprisingly appropriate. They read as a parallel text to the music, another layer added to the intensely told story of the music.

“We’ll see how it plays out with the music because I, frankly, have no idea,” Whiteside said. “The poems are wonderful, the music is wonderful, but how it will actually work remains to be seen.”

— by MiChelle Jones, for The Tennessean

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What: “Haydn’s Seven Last Words” performed by Nashville Sinfonietta, conducted by Dean Whiteside and featuring poems by Rick Hilles